Il faut se moquer

July 23, 2013

What is French America? I have been thinking about this strange question a good deal these days, as my relation to that nebulous region winds to a close. My immigration documents inform me that I arrived in Quebec on July 29, 2003. In a little over a week, on July 31, 2013, I will be getting on a one-way flight to Paris, ending a chapter of my life that lasted exactly a decade plus two days. Well, minus the year in Berlin, the eight months in and around New York, the several months away each summer. Still, notwithstanding these sorties, for two days more than a decade French America will have been my constant home and point de repère.

If you were to Google the phrase that serves as our title, you would get some blunt-minded advice about airlines and stopovers, but that's not what I mean. Consider rather this progression: From Paris, you set out to St. Malo, and from there to the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, then on to Quebec City, then Montreal, then Ottawa, then Toronto, Windsor, and, finally, you take the tunnel across the détroit into Détroit. Sorry, I mean Detroit. (In the process of Americanization, it's the accents that are first to go.) You have arrived in that most American of cities (now especially American in its failure), and you have done so by imperceptible degrees.

The most significant transition, in fact, is probably the first one, which takes place entirely within the Hexagon, as you move from the French capital to the peninsular Breton outpost, the walled city of the Malouins with the streets named after their native son Jacques Cartier. From there, you cross an ocean, guided by winds long known to Celts and Basques, but without leaving France: the aforementioned islands are French territoires outre-mer, and from them you can call Paris without using a national dialing code. But North America looms, obviously, and of practical necessity defines, with the migrating birds and the cold fronts and the light, the reality of these tiny settlements that cannot be artificially filtered out with the conventions laid down by the telephone service. So you move down the St. Lawrence a good way, and you come to a capital of sorts, walled like St. Malo, with tourist junk in shop windows like St. Malo, and you could be forgiven for your momentary confusion as to which side of the French Atlantic you are on. And then you continue down the St. Lawrence to the southwest, and you encounter other cities, some big and some small, each more shabby than the previous one, and each more American, more like Detroit, less like Paris, until you hit the great bankrupt ruin itself.

From there, if you like, you can enter out into a whole third of a continent dotted with French names that are now pronounced according to the rules of no known language: Des Moines is neither 'Dess Moynz' nor 'Day Mwahnne'; Terre Haute is 'Terra Hut'. Americans understand that there is some sort of foreignness there that they must respect, even if they don't know quite how. Yet during the Iowa primaries of each US presidential election, Radio-Canada will still send a reporter to find, in that Midwestern capital, a French-speaking American to tell the Québécois what is at stake, and they will act like it is the most natural thing in the world, like the Francophone man in the street had been chosen at random. And they will pronounce the name of the city just as if it were the partitive genitive plural of the French word for 'monk' that were in question.

How did it get this way? What is French America? We know about the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, of course, and how the overextended French empire, already happy to have thrown the battle against the British at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, was relieved in turn to dump the Mississippi River basin on the newly independent colonies. But that's not what I'm asking about, any more than I was interested before in Expedia itineraries.

One thing is certain to me after a decade in Montreal: French America is not Quebec, and it is a betrayal of a complicated, centuries-long, continent-wide history to circumscribe French America within these reduced provincial boundaries. French America is indeed something that radiates out from the St. Lawrence, and that extends to the Maritime Provinces, New England, the Canadian Prairies, and the American Midwest. I agree with at least the spirit of Pierre Trudeau's argument against the sovereigntists, that Quebec separatism is wrong to the extent that it would reduce a continental legacy, which overlaps in many places with other cultural legacies, to the neat but arbitrary boundaries set by cartography.

One of the cultural legacies with which French America overlaps in complex and unique ways, ways worth acknowledging and celebrating, is that of Native America (itself of course constituted out of many legacies). I am struck by the frequency with which I come across, in 19th-century non-French texts, the idea that French America (or French Canada, which is a proper part of this) occupies a sort of intermediate position between the native and colonial worlds. Thus Henry David Thoreau writes in 1853:

It has been observed by another that the French Canadians do not extend nor perpetuate their influence. The British, Irish, and other immigrants, who have settled the townships, are found to have imitated the American settlers and not the French. They reminded me in this of the Indians, whom they were slow to displace, and to whose habits of life they themselves more readily conformed than the Indians to theirs.... Thus, while the descendants of the Pilgrims are teaching the English to make pegged boots, the descendants of the French in Canada are wearing the Indian moccasin still.

And a half century earlier the German anatomist and natural philosopher Johann Friedrich Blumenbach took the case of the French Canadians as a classic case of 'racial degeneration' or reversion to the primitive state. He writes in the Contributions to Natural History of 1806:

Europeans enough... have found such a great delight in this wild state of nature as to lose all desire of changing it, and coming back to their own countrymen; nor are there wanting instances of it, especially among the French Canadians, who of their own free-will have gone over to the savages there, and taken up the same kind of life as they.

The idea is usually expressed in the terms typical of 19th-century progressivist chauvinism, but the authors who express it inadvertently convey an important historical truth: that the French colonial experience in America really was very different from the English one (and for that matter from the Spanish one). They came in small numbers to cold, forested regions. The life of the voyageurs and the coureurs de bois required adaptation to local realities, which meant in large part adaptation to cultural forms, native forms, already adapted to local geographies. This different reality gave rise in time to the Métis nation, to French-Algonquian creoles, and to a French-American identity that existed on a continuum with, rather than across a fundamental conceptual divide from, the native peoples European settlers were in the course of displacing. As I noted in a recent essay on Louis Riel, when this Métis resistance fighter was executed in Saskatchewan in 1885, this was perceived as much in Montreal as a blow against French Canada, as it was in the Prairies as a blow against Native Canada.

My mother came to visit from California in the Fall of 2003, shortly after I arrived from my first job in Cincinnati. She looked around my neighborhood (at the time, the Village de Lorimier on the eastern part of the Plateau), and said: "This looks like where you lived before." I was annoyed, in that irrational filial way, that she had placed me right back in the Midwest after my desperate flight away from it (I had been aiming for Europe then too, and was ridiculously sensitive about the fact that I had fallen several thousand kilometers short, and settled for what at the time I took to be some negligible North American simulacrum). "It's totally different!" I snapped back. "Why?" she pushed, "What's so different?"

I paused, and thought, and came up blank. "Because it starts with a 'Q'," I finally said, hoping to deflect my irritability into a joke.

But this reply may have been more profound than I understood at the time. Québec! What a name! Some sources will tell you that it derives from the Algonquian word Kébec, which means 'where the river narrows'. But of course that makes no sense: the Algonquians no more had the Greek kappa than they did the Latin qv, and what these amateur etymologists really mean to say is that we are looking at a Native word given a typical French orthography. There are other such instances of linguistic métissage, of course, some of them very unexpected: thus the -cad- in Acadie is the same as the -quod- in Passamaquoddy, that cartoonlike placename noticed by any slightly attentive vacationer to Maine. But Acadia has been fully translated into the elevated registers of European mythology (so very close to Arcadia!), and loses altogether its Algonquian force. Québec straddles both worlds perfectly.

In ten years in Montreal I have lived in six different places, three of them east of the Boulevard St. Laurent, and three of them west. Well, there was also that month and a half I'd rather not bring up, which was technically east of the great divide, but could hardly be called living. Then again it does help to tip the scales: I've lived more often on the French side of town than the English. In all, I feel I know Montreal very well. I have also been all around the province, even to that peculiarly circular lake north of Quebec City; to Val d'Or, the miserable gold mining town and gateway to the truly native North, where burly Québécois miners ride choppers with Confederate flags waving from the back; and all the way to Wemindji, on St. James Bay, where I stayed with the Cree, and helped make a ceremonial hut out of moss and twigs, and ate squash and flaked whitefish with admixed blueberries, as one might have done 5000 years ago.

I have flown back and forth to Toronto countless times. I have never been to the Maritimes, nor to the Prairies, nor to the Arctic. I will probably never go. As I said, I'm leaving in a few days.

It is however somewhat more likely that I will find myself again in the Detroit airport, or even passing through Des Moines, on some low-end academic roadshow. And I'll have my own private romance with the toponyms, enriched by this past decade in ways I expect to continue to discover, as those around me go about their history-less American business as if it had just always been that way.

April 27, 2013

I recently worked as an 'interpreter', to use the term of art, in This Situation, a work by Tino Sehgal on exhibit at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal throughout most of March and April, 2013. My reasons for signing on to this project are several, including some having to do with the commitments that ensue from friendship, and some, I'll confess, with my seemingly constitutional inability to get my financial situation in order (peers in a similar stage of their careers are using words like 'refinance' and 'diversify'; I'm out in the moonlight scraping together a security deposit for a short-term sublet in Paris). More importantly, I went into it in the hope that I would come out the other end with a properly informed critical judgment about the work and about the state of contemporary art. When I was a lad I enthused about every new thing that came along. I would shell out for CDs with recordings of HVAC sounds in office buildings, and would go to the Pompidou and look at Joseph Beuys' rolled-up carpets or whatever and think some inarticulate thought along the lines of: Fuck you, stuffy old people. In more recent years I have come to feel that modernity was already bad enough, let alone whatever is supposed to have come after it, and I spend most of my time thinking about things one could just as easily have thought about when Oedipus Rex first realized what he'd done. I'm not nearly as contemporary as this thing I've just been involved in, I mean to say, and this necessarily constrains what sort of things I shall be able to say about it.

This Situation is not, as might appear to a visitor after a few minutes, or even after a few hours, a free-wheeling conversation. There are rules governing what happens when, who moves when, and who says what when. It is in this respect nothing like the experimental improvisational theater of Jerzy Grotowski's legendary 'Beehive', where the experimental thespians enter some Polish forest, or an abandoned church, and start doing stuff, "and whatever happens, that's The Beehive" (quoting André Gregory). This is not, in fact, conceived as theater at all, experimental or otherwise (though there is at least one quotation in the work that anticipates a future Situationist theater in which the theatrical and the everyday blend into one), and this is why it is essential to stress that those involved are interpreters, and not actors, and still less a merry band of roving avant-garde thespians. The key difference, which I'm trying to work out here in writing, is ontological: This Situation is an object, not a performance.

The rules established by Sehgal function as parameters within which there is a great deal of freedom and indeterminacy; like certain genres of music, the work has its character from the way in which improvisations arise within formal constraints. Very summarily: there are six interpreters, each of whom has memorized between 20 and 40 quotations from philosophers (broadly conceived), the earliest dating to 1588 and the most recent to 2005. The six arrange themselves in a series of six different tableaux vivants in a hall of the museum, a hall with entirely white walls and no sign indicating who or what is in it. When a new visitor comes in, the six look at him or her and say, in unison, "Welcome to this situation" (always in English). They then take a deep, loud breath, again in unison, and walk backwards, slowly, to the next in the series of tableaux. They hold the position for anywhere from five seconds to a minute, until one of them (no one knows in advance which one) decides to rehearse one of the memorized citations, beginning with the fixed phrase, "In 1674 [or whatever the year happens to be], somebody said..." (always in English). There is no mention of the author's name, and the interpreter is not expected even to know the name. After the citation is finished, there is another, short silence, the interpreters slowly come out of the tableaux, and they begin, from whatever angle they choose, to discuss the citation (in either French or English). This goes on for a few minutes, until finally someone asks the visitor: "Or, what do you think?" (always in French). The interpreters are compelled to move to a new tableau either when a new visitor arrives, or when one of the interpreters decides to initiate a move by beginning a new, loud inhalation, which all of the other interpreters must join before beginning to walk backwards together, toward the next position. When there is no visitor in the room, the interpreters talk about how hungry they are, or how badly they have to pee, or, if the previous conversation about Situationist theater or the aesthetics of existence has proven interesting enough, they continue to talk about that.

Many of the quotations come from the Situationists, others from Montaigne, Nietzsche, Veblen, Keynes, Foucault. In suppressing the name of the author, the idea is that the interpreters will focus on the content of the quotation. What generally happens is a sort of split between two possible approaches among the interpreters. One is to riff, to recount impressions of whatever the quotation might induce one to think (or even to feel). The other is to try, within the constraints imposed by the work, to be as scholarly as possible and to get at what the author might in fact have meant. I belong squarely in the latter camp; I don't really know how to approach, say, a claim from an author in 1862 purporting to explain the nature of ennui without attempting to root it in its time and place. But there are endless ways to approach any given quotation, and after one has heard a certain one numerous times, there is a natural wish to try to approach it from some new direction. Thus, to cite just one example, a quotation from Thorstein Veblen might be spontaneously declaimed by one of the six interpreters:

In 1899 somebody said: "Aucun article ne sera passable qui se prévaudra seulement d'être de bon service matériel. Pour être pleinement acceptable, il lui faudra exhiber l'élément honorifique. Un consommateur qui voudrait à toute force, tel Diogène, éliminer de sa consommation tous les éléments d'honorabilité ou de gaspillage, serait dans l'incapacité de fournir à ses besoins les plus insignifiants sur le marché moderne [No article will be viable that pretends only to being of good material service. In order to be fully acceptable, it must exhibit an honorific element. A consumer who would wish at all costs, such as Diogenes, to eliminate from his consumption all elements of honorability or of waste would be unable to provide for his needs, be they ever so insignificant, on the modern market]."

The first ten times or so that I heard this quotation, knowing that it was from Veblen but also knowing that it would be too bluntly scholarly to begin talking about fin-de-siècle American social theory right off the bat, I would instead try to work in some observations about this Diogenes mentioned in passing, whom I knew to be Diogenes the Cynic. I enjoyed bringing up the anecdote about him (where it first arises I don't know, but in that exhibition hall there was never any need to cite one's sources), which tells us that he was once discovered struggling to eat a live octopus, since, he explained, cooking is a mere social convention and a hassle. Before long, however, my mention of this case grew predictable and scripted, my fellow interpreters grew tired of it, I grew tired of it. I came to dislike this quotation exceedingly, and grimaced inwardly whenever it would come up (though none pained me nearly as much as Félix Guattari's pompous wank, from 1993, about global warming).

The most difficult quotation for me, in this connection, was the one that started, "In 1710 somebody said...," and continued with the famous dictum, "To be is to be perceived." Much of my scholarly career is devoted to studying the cluster of metaphysical issues surrounding the initial enunciation of that sentence by the idealist philosopher George Berkeley. The dictum has to do with the non-existence of matter, understood as a metaphysical substratum in which properties inhere, yet as a stand-alone quotation in Sehgal's work, it was almost invariably understood as of a pair with the quotations from Veblen about conspicuous consumption: To be (socially) is to be perceived (as having some sort of social distinction). I often found it painful to have to go along with the riffing on quotations I in fact knew to have a very concrete meaning, and one that it would be very interesting and worthwhile to draw out. And yet, my frustration waned as time went by. I became convinced of the worthwhileness of the exercise.

Early on, beyond the frustration with some of the formal parameters of the work, I was also consistently frustrated at Sehgal's choice of content. I wanted more quotations from antiquity; I wanted quotations with more humour to them; I wanted more stuff I care about, like animals and nature and God, and not all this stuff I don't care about, like salon culture and economics. But the work is not a conversation about 'philosophical ideas' in general, as I've heard said many times by people who have seen the work or even by those who have interpreted it. Rather, it is a conversation driven by quotations that all, as far as I can tell, have to do with the conditions of possibility of the work itself: the nature of conversation, the ontology of the work of art, the question whether life itself could be aesthetic or artistic, the problem of freedom and the constraints of our social roles, the economic substratum of social interaction.

These are what the work is about, yet one of the formal constraints under which the interpreters operate is that they must never address the work itself explicitly. If visitors ask whether the interpreters are reciting memorized lines, or whether they get paid for their work, or whether they personally consider Tino Sehgal a full-fledged artist or not, the interpreters are required to subvert that line of interaction, by moving to another tableau vivant, or by 'doing a caption' (where each interpreter enunciates one-sixth of the phrase 'Tino Sehgal, This Situation, 2007'), or by going silent. One visitor, who turned out to be a local artist of some repute, attempted to induce us to break out of character by dropping a five-dollar bill (five dollars!) in the middle of the exhibition hall, apparently to see if we would leap on it hungrily, and also, one infers, to make a statement about the tawdry relationship between conceptual art and Mammon. (No one paid it any mind, and he finished his visit by scooping it back up on the way out.) The rule of the game, anyhow, what I take to be the supreme directive that gives the work its character and tone, is that we are constantly orbiting around the questions that have to be addressed in order to talk about the work, yet we are never able to talk about the work. We are thus pushing up against the boundary between talking about the external world on the one hand and self-referentiality on the other, always in danger of crossing the boundary, but always also, insofar as we manage to respect the boundary, only representing a peculiar portion of life, to wit, those dimensions of it that start to become particularly interesting when things like This Situation become possible.

But the work is 'about itself' in another sense as well. It is well known that an important motivation for Sehgal's work is the exploration of immateriality, and of what I take ultimately to be a serious philosophical question: whether there can be such things as immaterial art objects at all (from which it would follow that there can be such things as immaterial objects, which is another, perhaps even more interesting question). More precisely, the question seems to be whether there can be immaterial art objects that are treated in every way like material ones. Thus the ontological issue is not illuminated by pointing to dance or symphonic performances, which Monroe Beardsley would explain in terms of the token/type distinction: these are art forms where inherently the object itself, to the extent that we may speak of such a thing, only exists through its instantiation in repeated and dispersed tokens. There is no single thing that is expected to be, e.g., Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder. The sort of art that is displayed in museums, by contrast, is expected to be such that in principle one can always say precisely where the art is, at which museum, in what condition, etc. Sehgal seems to have wanted to see whether there could be an art object that is dematerialized like a dance, yet held and displayed and treated according to all the same museological conventions as a sculpture or painting. I don't know what hangs on this, and I don't think that in the end, if such an innovation succeeds, anything new about the ontology of art will have been discovered; I don't think art has an ontology independent of the social and institutional framework that determines what can or can't be passed off as a work of art, and of course this framework is constantly being readjusted. But still, it is a compelling exercise to explore as Sehgal does, intelligently and respectfully, the current limits of readjustment.

The concern for immateriality extends to --or perhaps better, begins with-- the very business transacted with the museums that purchase the work. As is often noted, Sehgal refuses to allow the business of purchasing the works to be grounded in written contracts and records. There is, rumour has it, no paper trail. This makes the trustees of museums uncomfortable, and compels the directors of the museums to attempt to convince the trustees that it's only by adapting to such unconventional means of transaction that their museum (say, a museum in a second- or third-tier city with aspiration to being a serious global cultural player) can stay in the game.

It is clear, anyhow, that the exploration of the boundary that one witnesses in the museum hall, between immaterial art forms on the one hand and displayable art objects, has its parallel in the museum office, or wherever this business transpires, in the exploration of the boundary between the permanent and the ephemeral. Sehgal is putting in place all sorts of conditions to ensure the ephemerality of the thing he has brought into existence (and here I'm defaulting to 'thing' as opposed to 'object', 'work', etc., as the most ontologically non-commital term I can find), and then trying to get the world --both institutions and the pubic-- to treat it as something permanent. Some immaterial things are not at all ephemeral (the soul, perhaps angels), but in Sehgal's work the two are constantly contrasted with materiality and permanence, and at the same time are made to occupy the roles of the latter, their opposites, to the extent possible.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that the real work that is called This Situation is the feat that is pulled off in the office, not the exhibition hall; that this pulling off is a sort of passing off; and that the main limit Sehgal is interested in exploring is not the one between the material and the immaterial, or even the one between the permanent and the ephemeral, but rather it is the limit of the flexibility of the museum as an institution. The idea seems to be to push and find out just how accommodating museums will be. From a certain point of view, this is disappointing: art, one might think, is supposed to be in museums, not about museums. But museums are institutions, and institutions function within economies, and so the museological experimentation can already claim to be a critical engagement with our social structure as a whole. Whether that in turn is what art ought to be doing, or not, is another question, but either way there is nothing trivial about doing it. In the actual performance of This Situation, anyhow, in the exhibition hall as opposed to the office, the work does not seem trivially or hermetically art-world-oriented. It balances on the ledge of self-referentiality, as I've said, but what one would get if it fell over that ledge would not be the sort of tedious insider chatter I can picture sleek collectors and lowly gossipy scenesters indulging in, but real philosophical questions about existence, illusion, freedom, and the ontology of art.

Once the museum purchases the work, it 'owns' it, at least as long as everyone is willing to go along saying as much, as long as everyone is willing to honour, and able to remember, the handshake. They own a thing that is not stored anywhere, and for which there is no record of purchase. I would not wish to have to place a bet on the fate of this proprietary relation in 100 years' time. It will change, that is certain, and I think Sehgal is counting on that as well. Arguably, the difference between the proper care of this 'object' that comes into a museum's possession is not fundamentally different from the proper care of a painting, whose fate in 100 years depends both on things like temperature, humidity, exposure to sunlight; as well as on the changing circumstances of museums in society (for all we know, in 100 years paintings might be most valuable as fuel for bonfires to keep warm in former museum spaces converted to squats). Similarly, the museum will have to care for This Situation; new interpreters will have to be brought in for new iterations; they will have to be well trained and fairly remunerated; continuity with previous iterations will have to be ensured. As has been well said, buying This Situation is something like coming into ownership of a plant, which must be groomed and watered, kept alive. But in addition, the social circumstances that make this claim to ownership make sense must be preserved. And that is something quite beyond the power of a museum, or even of the entirety of people who claim to have a stake in the future of art, to control.

The prohibition on documentation extends as well to filming, to audio-recording, and to the proliferation of official souvenirs. Here I must say it is wonderful to be involved in something that takes a principled stand against tchotchkes: no t-shirts, no mugs, no pens. Here, also, it may be that Sehgal is trying to push through to that other dimension of immateriality that is thought to obtain, e.g., in churches and other sites where filming is discouraged precisely because what is really going on in there cannot be captured by the documentation of any particular moment or sliver. The ban on permanent traces is perhaps not so much motivated by a respect for ephemerality, as by a concern for eternity. A thing that goes on forever (at least potentially) cannot be made to go on for two minutes.

There is also, I think, the concern to prevent any trace of the work from congealing into a paradigmatic instance of it, in the way that type fossils of paleontological species come to stand for the species itself, or studio recordings of pop songs come to be thought of as the works themselves rather than as instances of them. Such a development seems implausible however, and one imagines that scattered shoddy clips of This Situation on YouTube could at most have roughly the same relation to the work that, say, Grateful Dead bootlegs once had to the Deadhead phenomenon. The Dead famously delighted in the proliferation of these fan-made traces, and one gets the sense that in the end the prohibition on traces of Sehgal's work has more to do with a preoccupation with purity than with any necessary ontological stopgap. iPhones are tacky, and only yokels pull 'em out, in order to compensate for an inability to rigorously engage with the work. This goes for La Joconde no less than for This Situation, but the one big difference is that for Sehgal's work the yokel's appetite cannot be slaked afterwards by a trip to the gift shop.

But what, after all, is my critical judgment? Well, there were some moments of astounding perfection, where everything came together perfectly and made everyone in the hall think, together: My goodness, yes, there is something happening here. I do not think this something could be easily attained without the sum total of institutional circumstances of the work being just what they were. And I do not, moreover, think that this something could be attained without the particular talent of Tino Sehgal, which consisted in setting the formal parameters just right, and giving just the right sort of fuel in the form of the citations, which I now (unlike at the beginning) see were chosen with extreme care. The fact that so much depended on spontaneity within those formal parameters meant that inevitably the great majority of moments were not stunning; we had to work at getting to those moments, which came maybe once a day, or even less frequently. Because an individual interpreter could only ever be responsible for at most one-sixth of the meaning production, and because the visitors were so irreducibly unique and unpredictable, even if one were working hard at achieving a perfect moment, it could always slip away just as it was coming into reach. In this respect, it has rightly been said that the work functions much like humour, even though it is not intrinsically funny at all: it requires the rare and perfect confluence of individual inspiration with the sum total of extraneous circumstances. When these start to flow together in a perfect way, even for just a moment, it starts to feel like riding a wave; it starts to feel like the supreme manifestation of freedom. Until someone says something that falls flat, and the wave comes crashing down.

I am skeptical of the idea, expressed so urgently by Denis Diderot, that il faut se hâter de rendre la philosophie populaire. But I don't think that philosophy for the masses is really what this work is about, and I don't think that when the question comes, Ou, que pensez vous?, it is a matter of turning the freedom to philosophize over to the proverbial man or woman in the museum. But I can say that the conversations that happened there were generally at least as interesting, and often as faithful to the intentions of the authors, as what I've seen in so many university classrooms. Universities, moreover, appear to be dying out, or at least transforming beyond recognition into the sort of places where, in the very near future, it is likely that one will not be able to investigate philosophical ideas in them at all. As the 'owners' and guardians of this sort of activity, I'm just as happy to invest my hope in museums as in universities.

But again, it's not about philosophy in general. It's about limning, without tackling straight on, the conditions of possibility of a work such as this-- the economic and aesthetic conditions, in particular. It seems to me that even if you would lament these conditions, even if you would rather see contemporary-art museums filled with material objects showing the marks of technical precision in painting or sculpture, you can still agree that given that this is what the conditions in fact are, it is a worthwhile thing to come up with conceptual work that investigates these conditions, and indeed that in pushing at them can easily appear as wary as the most indignant classicist of the contemporary situation in art.

I find, in the end, that I do not really have a critical judgment to share about the artwork as such or about the current state of contemporary art: about This Situation or about this situation. My judgment, such as it is, is rooted more in my concern for philosophy and dialogue. Here I can only say that I am pleased to find someone coming up with new variations on these ancient activities, and enabling me and others to experience, on at least a few occasions, something close to perfect instances of them.

December 13, 2012

To the right is a low-quality photograph of an ad currently in circulation in the Montreal metro system. Its purpose is to encourage Montrealers to contribute money in support of research on and treatment of prostate cancer. The slogan at the top says 'Support the Prostates from Here!', which is to say from Québec, the prostates of Quebeckers. The image below is a sort of athletic cup adorned with a Québécois fleur-de-lys, atop which floats a circle that, in a stroke of graphic genius, seems to represent a halo and an elastic waistband at once.

The slogan plays on a common plea often found in connection with fruits, cheeses, and other foodstuffs produced in the province: 'Soutenez les x d'ici', is, for any x, a way of saying 'Buy Québécois', support the provincial (or, depending how you see it, national) economy through your spending habits.

The slogan also, in taking 'prostate' as a possible value of 'x', takes the reproductive systems of Québécois men as part of the total Québécois system of production, alongside the production of cheese and foie gras, and sees all of this production as contributive to national health and well-being, understood in the broad sense here in which these overlap with national pride and glory.

Obviously, this ad inscribes itself in a long history of cross-hybridity between public health and nationalism. Alison Bashford argues fairly convincingly in her Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism, and Public Health of 2004 that large-scale public-health campaigns are in fact an ineliminable feature of modern projects of constructing national identity.

What is particularly interesting here, though, is that the ad updates the old formula, in its echoing of the broader North American society's current preoccupation with defeating cancer through orchestrated, mass-scale public gestures of charity, and moreover does so with a pseudo-risqué wink and with a self-conscious, jocular avowal that in this day and age our body parts are not so much like cogs in the great national machine, as one might have seen in early Soviet vaccination propaganda, as they are like vendable commercial goods.

April 26, 2012

I wrote this last week for a US publication, but it ended up falling through the cracks there, so I'll just post it here.

On April 23, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilian Radovac aptly described the past few months of upheaval across Quebec as "the biggest student uprising you've never heard of." This movement, which began building from early February of this year, has at its peak involved over 300,000 students across the province. A demonstration on March 22 attracted over 200,000 participants to the streets of Montreal. There have been scores of arrests.

The official reason for the movement is student opposition to the announcement from the government of provincial prime minister Jean Charest of its intention to raise university tuition around 75% over the next five years, to a little under $4000 per year. At the end of this period, Quebec tuition will still be the lowest of all Canadian universities, which are in turn much less expensive than all American public universities.

In spite of what many outside of the province consider a deal too good to complain about, one frequent demand of the demonstrators is for something even better than what Quebec students had before the hikes: free university education for all. This is of course a tall order, and that it can be made at all has much to do with the unique place of Quebec in North American society, and with the sense of many in this province that it is a society based on a different set of values, and a different set of choices, than those of the rest of the continent. As Sameer Zuberi wrote recently in the Huffington Post, "Quebecers have made a societal choice to keep education accessible to all, regardless of income."

One question right now is whether Quebec will in fact be able to hold out against the consumer model of education that is sweeping the world around it. While it may be that the global economic forces behind these changes are too powerful to be resisted, many Quebec students believe that theirs is a special pocket of the world, one where there remains some hope that things can be done differently. This belief is utopian and traditionalist at once: in addition to insisting on a future for the university that any business model of this institution would deem unrealistic, it also insists on holding to a conception of the university that the business model supposes to be of no value in today's world.

The attitude of the government, and of university administrations, is stubbornly 'realistic', a realism that manifests itself in consistent unwillingness to engage in dialogue with the student demonstrators. Instead, university administrations have largely preferred to let the police, and in some cases private security firms, do their speaking for them, in the language of force. This is surprising, particularly after a pepper-spray incident at McGill University last Fall seemed to most in the Quebec university community to drive home the point that universities are better off handling their own affairs, even when these involve tremendous discord, rather than calling in outside force to do so.

Whether Quebec can hold out against broader regional and global changes or not, it is not difficult to see that there are larger social factors behind the discontent, of which the hikes are only one symptom, concerning the value of education and the future of the university. Many of the most engaged students, and many of the most vocal defenders of the strike among faculty members, are based in philosophy departments. It is difficult not to notice that it is the vision of the university that philosophers tend to hold --as a sanctuary for disinterested inquiry, and as a place where one begins a life-long process of cultivating wisdom and character-- that is currently under threat, and that this threat is part of the broader set of reasons that have brought the student movement into being.

To put this last point a bit more pessimistically: it is growing ever harder to study, to teach, and to do philosophy in North American universities. One has the sense, in fact, that from a high administrator's point of view, the humanities in general must appear as a sort of vestigial organ upon the university, something it hasn't yet lost fully through the process of evolution, yet something that no longer contributes to the central mission of the university. That mission is, increasingly, to 'partner' with the private sector. Among other things, this partnering requires that academics learn to speak, or to imitate, the language of the men and women of business. And this in turn requires that the short-term pay-off of inquiry be immediately evident, even, or especially, to those who are not participating in the inquiry.

Until recently the slogan of my own university was 'Real Education for the Real World'. That always rubbed me the wrong way, for a great part of philosophy is dedicated to the systematic investigation of the problem of the real world: of whether it exists, of how we can know whether it does, and, if it does exist, of its nature and ultimate causes. Philosophers can't assume at the outset that they know what sort of world one ought to be preparing for, and in this respect any philosophy that pretends to be preparing students for some pre-given, clearly defined 'real world' is fake philosophy.

Of course, by 'real world' what is implicitly meant is 'business world'. Late in March, Guillaume Charette, a law student at the Université de Montréal requested an injunction against the strikers on the grounds --often rehearsed by Quebec university administrations-- that students are not unionized workers and so it is literally impossible for them to strike; they are in fact consumers, who are only 'boycotting' a particular sort of service (and one for which they have already paid). Carl Bouchard, a history professor at the Université de Montréal, noted in response that on this narrow definition, we would also have to redescribe hunger-strikers as 'food-boycotters'. But the bigger problem with Charette's argument is that it misconstrues education as something that can be consumed, something that can be purchased, rather than as a process of self-cultivation, with which the university and its faculty are much better able to assist when the students do not take us to be serving them in the same way flight attendants or Starbucks employees do.

Ostensibly in the name of 'better service', universities are cutting corners and streamlining in a way that is jarringly similar to the recent upheavals in, say, the airline industry. Like almost every industry in recent years, more and more of the university experience is moving online. One often hears that the fate of the newspaper industry is the best guide to what will happen, with perhaps a decade's delay, to the university. I recently learned that my own university will soon be offering students the choice of submitting course evaluations (that is, assessments of my ability in introducing them to philosophy) by mobile phone. The student evaluation, once a necessary counterweight to the sometimes arbitrary authority of faculty members, is now reduced to a convenient iPhone app, a streamlining of the educational product that directly parallels the appearance of mobile-phone-based boarding passes. Both the educational and the travel technologies are meant to be used with equal casualness and insouciance.

One way to understand the current movement would be to suppose that there is a dawning awareness that being given handy new apps for submission of course evaluations is not at all the same thing as being listened to. At every turn, the Quebec government has reacted to the students' requests to open up lines of communication with something approaching contempt. The government's line has been that there is nothing to discuss, since the budget is already a fait accompli. But what this misses are the broader concerns about the fate of education. It also misses the value of the students' sincere effort to think about radically different --and, yes, unrealistic-- models of the fate of universities in an era in which the consumer model threatens to infect nearly all varieties of human social interaction.

January 5, 2012

From the n+1 2011 Year-in-Review. For other contributors' perspectiveson that annus horribilis mirabilisque, please go here.

This year I betrayed my country. Or at least that’s how it felt, even if, from what I’ve been able to learn, the US tolerates dual citizenship by means of something like a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. There I was, after eight years of paperwork, of interrogations by the Délégation du Québec about my knowledge of that province’s charming folkways, of counting every day outside of Canada lest I go beyond my limit and find my permanent resident status revoked: there I was, I say, in July, in Montreal, before an immigration judge, some Mme. Robichaud or Tremblay, swearing, along with seventy-two other soon-to-be-Canadians from thirty-eight different countries, my allegiance to Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada (a different person, by the way, than Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, even if the two persons inhabit the same physical body). This part was not so hard, as she looks like a kind old lady. But then came the line about “her successors,” and I thought about what it would mean to actually be loyal to that lad William, say, whose birth I remember as if it were yesterday, and I confess I began to mumble my lines. We did the recitation in English and French, and the French part was a good deal easier for me. Hell, I’ll swear anything in a language that resides only in my head and not in my heart. Behind me, by contrast, a man from somewhere in Francophone Africa bellowed out the French part directly from his heart. There were tears in his eyes and his voice quivered. I thought of the Ontario politician Garth Turner, who denounced the “Canadians of convenience,” that is, those who swoop through just long enough to get the passport before moving on. The African behind me was no Canadian of convenience, whereas I, I understood, might very well turn out to be one. In the end my principle motivation to become Canadian was that I might thereby be free to leave the place without having to count the days. I am now at liberty to abscond until 2040, if I feel like it, just in time for a bit of free palliative medicine in my final days. The man behind me believed in the idea of Canada, whereas I, whatever the current reality, cannot deny that it is the United States I believe in, that I carry in my heart, if I may be permitted to put it sentimentally, and that my association with the monarchy to the north will always remain rather more circumstantial. The US is a bloated and aggressive empire populated by snake-charming enemies of Enlightenment, Canada is a decent and sober social democracy, et cetera. But heavens, one is who one is, and in my shiny new Canadian passport, just after Lieu de naissance it says “Reno, USA”: surely the most significant bit of information in that document. It is a question of habitus, which is something so deep that the matter is already more or less settled even before we are begat. Mine in particular took shape in the late 18th century, and hates kings and queens, especially the ones no one believes in anyway. I am proud of my new status: I got 100 percent on the citizenship exam (what does A mari usque ad mare mean? Which province is the leading producer of wood pulp?), and I show off my passport like a fetish. But the taint of the betrayer is not going to go away.

November 24, 2010

I think it's splendid to live in a country with two official languages. At risk of having my citizenship application rejected, however, it seems to me there are a number of ways in which the enforcement of bilingualism in everyday life both wastes our time and, more importantly, forces us to witness abuses (of both languages, but most often of French) that ought to make any lover of language moan.

It is taken for granted in Canada that everything 'important' ought to be said twice, in order to accommodate the two official ethnolinguistic constituencies. Many of us understand both versions, and are made to sit through two different rounds of exactly the same speech, exactly the same set of instructions given over an automated hotline, exactly the same --to speak with Francis Bacon-- Idiotismes. This policy fails to accommodate those of us, however, who tend not to think that what is being said is important to begin with, and have enough trouble sitting through the first iteration of some unctuous speech at some meaningless awards ceremony, or listening to the first run-through of the inherently regrettable reminder before a classical concert that all electronic devices should be switched off. I find myself wishing I didn't understand either language, and wondering how anyone could possibly feel publicly gratified or validated by hearing the platitudes of modern life spoken in the language he or she associates with home and hearth.

Far better would it be to agree that only one language be spoken --pick a language, I don't care which-- and then expect that everyone rise to the task of understanding it. For the most part, even if they are unable to rise to the task, they will not be missing much. I have sat through awards ceremonies conducted entirely in Turkish, I note, and do not feel that I was terribly disadvantaged, notwithstanding my general cluelessness at the time as to the rules for the generation of syntactic compounds through agglutination. Language, I never tire of saying, is a paper-thin wrapping around a much vaster and more complex (and evolutionally more deeply engrained) social reality made up primarily of gestures, expressions, and other bodily motions that do not centrally involve the tongue and the larynx.

But this indictment is a small one in relation to the scandal of product packaging in Canada. Not so long ago I saw, in the window of a Dollarama (which deserves a separate indictment, by the way), something that was labelled as a Halloween Big Daddy Kit, containing a fake gold chain with a dollar-sign pendant, a few fake gold caps for the teeth, and various other signifiers of membership in African-American urban culture. Offensive as the thought of a latter-day blackface routine is, even more offensive to my mind is the supposedly French translation that the Chinese company that manufactured this junk for some reason bothered to slap onto the packaging: Kit de 'Big Daddy' de Halloween.

This, I think, is something that never should have been written by anyone, something simply too stupid to be seen as speaking to the laudable demand for recognition of any ethnolinguistic community. It's not just that every word but the two prepositions is Anglo-Saxon in origin (one a recent borrowing; two others part of a presumedly untranslatable phrase that gets placed in scare quotes; and, finally, one left in English even though a perfectly adequate French equivalent, trousse, is readily available). It is rather that the pseudo-French rendering of the phrase reveals how completely unworthy of being said the original English was. If the French were permitted to play precisely this role and no other, that is, the role of destroying the pretensions of the English, then it would be welcome. But we are expected to take both seriously, and both as perfectly equivalent mirror images of one another, conveying a perfectly legitimate idea.

But junk capitalism is in general so stupid, and what it asks us to believe so utterly devoid of real meaning, that it's simply misguided to suppose that we are being spoken to at all by the words on the products that it asks us to buy. The supposition that obligatory bilingual packaging could satisfy a community's demand for recognition could only be maintained by someone who does not really cherish language to begin with, but simply sees it as a blunt tool of political maneuvering. Let the Chinese spew out their junk in English (for now; eventually it will all be in Chinese alone, and all of these debates about the recognition of communities will seem thoroughly quaint), and let what's worth being said be said in French. This would be a just division of linguistic tasks, and one that would not at all compromise Canada's status as a bilingual country. Many countries and regions, in fact, from Luxembourg to Kazakhstan, permit just this sort of distinction of roles for different social purposes, and they do not seem to be handicapped by this.

In fact they seem, if I may be frank, rather more elegant. I'm tired of seeing signs that tell me I'm on the 'Campus Sir George Williams Campus', or at the 'Centre Eaton Centre', or that I'm eating 'Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates' (every time I see this last redudancy I think: Well of course I am. You just said that!). These are phrases in no known language. They speak to no community at all.

October 8, 2010

There's no easier way to get a gratuitous dose of uncanniness than by throwing together some mannequins. As every hack art student has noticed, there is something inherently troubling about them: they're like people, except that they're not; in this respect, they are like the beings that populate the majority of my nightmares.

The word 'mannequin' is just a diminituvization of 'man' ('manny-kin'), and so is really nothing other than the English version of the Latin homunculus. The dream of creating a little man in a workshop, by means of art and science, is of course one of the staples of the alchemical tradition and of its sundry representations in arts and literature.

But Frankenstein and the Golem are one thing; the dusty, faded lay figures sometimes spotted propping up clothing in low-end stores quite another. One wonders what the owners could be thinking, how they could imagine that associating the clothing with these fake bodies makes it any more attractive than, say, simply fastening it to the wall.

Uncanniness can be reduced, somewhat, by ensuring that all the parts are attached, and in the right places. But the shop owners in this case seem not even to be aware of the ordinary composition of the human body. It is true, for example, that they are selling clothing and not rings, and so strictly speaking their mannequins do not need all of their fingers. But who could imagine themselves in clothing first seen modeled by a fingerless homunculus?

October 2, 2010

Yesterday, I described in some detail the unfortunate, even Shandy-esque series of events that led to my being stuck with the name 'Justin'. I mentioned that until the age of eight this had only been my middle name, and that I myself caused it to be moved to the front of the line in consequence of some incomprehensible eight-year-old's caprice that I do not want to detail again here.

What I did not mention is how that name managed to be included among my middle names in the first place. As it happens my father was at the time an attentive follower of local politics throughout all of North America, and though I was born in Reno, Nevada, somehow the news managed to arrive in our high-desert home that some months earlier the prime minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, had had a son, and had named him 'Justin'.

The Washoe County Vital Statistics office will confirm that there were not many children in my cohort to be named after the son of a Canadian prime minister, and I admit it is an obscure choice, but in defense of my father I note that the Trudeaus were widely hailed at the time as 'Canada's Kennedys', and in any case it was at that time only a middle name.

I didn't think much about the significance of this particular namesake until I arrived in Montreal, and noticed that the woman who worked at my neighborhood dry-cleaning establishment could only remember my name by reference to the former prime minister's son. This excited an old memory, and I attempted to explain to her that, even though I am American, it is precisely Justin Trudeau whom I have to thank or to curse for my bearing of that unbearable name to this day.

A few more years passed. The Trudeau family offspring popped up in the Canadian press from time to time... a Timberlake appeared, then a Bieber... Justin Morgan enjoyed almost no notice at all, except as a footnote to the equestrian fantasies of maladapted girls who could not be made to buy into the new, shiny, teen-pop transformation of the 'Justin' brand. I continued to come and go at my place of employment in the centre-ville, and to adapt myself to being addressed, with ever increasing regularity, as 'sir'.

And then one day, as I approached the Guy-Concordia metro station, what did I find but an encampment of purported sidewalk dwellers, sprawled in my path as if they were sans abri, but looking far too middle-class for anyone to believe that they were there of necessity? One of them, I heard the crowd muttering, was none other than the minister of parliament for Papineau, Justin Trudeau, who had taken to the streets to raise awareness of the problem of homelessness. It was his intention to spend the whole night on the sidewalk of the boulevard de Maisonneuve, along with a media crew and a bevvy of fawning supporters. And it was his very feet that were extended across the sidewalk, crosswise, right in my path. It was only 7:30 or so, I note, but the MP seemed ready to just keep lying there, already at this early hour, as if he were getting ready to doze off.

I stepped right over Justin Trudeau's feet, his supposedly homeless feet, and as I was stepping I paused to get a good look at him. Should I tell him he's my namegiver, I wondered? Should I tell him it's his fault I wound up with this ill-fitting moniker? I thought about it, and then I remembered: no, it's not his fault. It's my fault. He's only responsible for the middle name, which is an appropriate level of responsibility, in Nevadan onomastic affairs, for the son of a Canadian prime minister. I'm the one who insisted on promoting him to Prime Moniker, to Chief of Names.

I continued on my way. He, apparently, spent the entire night in that spot: the man after whom I was named... sort of.

September 4, 2010

And what far-flung corner of the French-speaking world might this be, where one is supposed to be enticed by the promise of sensual revelry into a former down-market casual-dining chain restaurant in the parking lot of a frontage-road strip mall?

August 12, 2010

I have a not-so-modest proposal, but before I get to it I'll start, as is often my habit, with a bit of autobiography.

Prior to moving to Canada in 2003, I never really thought about the existence of Native Americans. Of course I'd heard the standard histories, seen the caricatures in old movies, was able to make some basic distinctions as to the names and locations of the different tribes. But the appropriation of the continent and the setting up there of a new and successful nation state seemed to me, from my American perspective, to be such a thorough fait accompli that any suggestion of the enduring moral obligation to reflect on and perhaps respond to past wrongs would have seemed to me as foreign as a proposal to reconstitute Gondwanaland. This very much in contrast with the legacy of slavery, which never escaped my notice as the gaping wound that defines my country's history and character.

I don't know quite what changed; perhaps it was simply the little, symbolic things that the well-meaning Canadian government does to recognize the First Nations (including, by the way, calling them 'First Nations'), such as providing links on many government websites in Mohawk, Inuktitut, and so on. Perhaps it was the very absence of a legacy of slavery (which, I insist, has only to do with the different exigencies of a different sort of colonial economy: one without large-scale plantation farming), which leaves Canada with only one original sin, rather than two.

Whatever it was, over the past several years I have acquired what I take to be a distinctly Canadian sensibility about the First Nations issue, namely, one that supposes that it is not too late to do something about the wrongs that were done a long time ago; or, rather, that the colonial powers are not absolved of the need to do something simply because the wrongs were done a long time ago. It is still a live issue.

This changing sensibility converges in my life with another: an abrupt surge in my distaste for royalism, which I also first noticed around 2003 (I'd scarcely thought of it before that). I simply do not want to have to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth (or worse, her son) when I'm finally permitted to go through the citizenship ceremony, perhaps 12-15 months from now, and I also would rather not be compelled to mutter the words insincerely.

At the same time, I do find some arguments for a separation of the symbolic and executive powers of the chief-of-state compelling. I think it would be very nice, for example, if there were some other figure alongside the American president whose looks the chattering classes might scrutinize, and whose spouse might be judged as strong-willed, well dressed, etc., while meanwhile the real executive might be judged on his or her accomplishments.

Now in Canada we already do have such a separation: the governor general is the highest political figure in the country, and she is unelected. She is the representative of the country to the queen (or perhaps it is the other way around). The way Canada can dare to call itself a democracy even as its highest political figure remains unelected is by confining her duties to the symbolic realm, to the political theater that is likely ineliminable from the running of states but that, again, should be kept as far away as possible from the people who have to do the real running: the budgeting and law-making.

So such a separation of symbolic and real governance is good, but that the symbolic side should take the form of representation to the Queen of England (in her capacity as Queen of Canada, which, along with 14 other such posts --Queen of Jamaica, Queen of Papua New Guinea, etc.-- is evidently something different) is simply a vestige of a colonial legacy that up until now Canada has only shaken off in a half-assed way. At the same time, Canada is de facto the moral beacon of North America, and this is very much in evidence in the different way, relative to the United States, that it relates to the enduring legacy of its birth out of a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

This brings me to my proposal, which I am nearly certain will be shot down for a whole host of reasons I have not considered: why not shift the center of symbolic power, from a governor general who answers to a foreign monarch, to a council of First Nations elders?

The details, obviously, remain to be worked out. I imagine it would be constituted from representatives of the different major Nations, and they would take turns sending forth a chief to occupy the council's presidency. The principle duties of the council or its president would be to represent Canada at a ceremonial level. Perhaps also it could be consulted on questions of use of public land and other matters of environmental concern. The exact degree of involvement in the decision-making process could be determined later; in any case, it would be at least as great as it is now, even as the main purpose of such a change would be not to alter the way policy is made, but rather to officialize and solemnize the self-understanding of Canada as in its essence a nation that was built through the appropriation of other people's territory, and that is now prepared to do what it can, short of sending the descendants of the settlers home (I'm certainly not going anywhere), in order to redeem itself.